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CPO Standards
Contributed by: Mike McCaffrey, Admiral (retired
USN)
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Never forget this, a Chief can
become an Officer, but an Officer can never become a Chief.
Chiefs have their standards!
Recollections of a Whitehat.
"One thing we weren't aware of at the time, but became
evident as life wore on, was that we learned true leadership
from the finest examples any lad was ever given, Chief Petty
Officers. They were crusty old bastards who had done
it all and had been forged into men who had been time tested
over more years than a lot of us had time on the planet.
The ones I remember wore hydraulic oil stained hats with
scratched and dinged-up insignia, faded shirts, some with a
Bull Durham tag dangling out of their right-hand pocket or a
pipe and tobacco reloads in a worn leather pouch in their
hip pockets, and a Zippo that had been everywhere.
Some of them came with tattoos on their forearms that would
force them to keep their cuffs buttoned at a Methodist
picnic.
Most of them were as tough as a boarding house steak.
A quality required to survive the life they lived.
They were, and always will be, a breed apart from all other
residents of Mother Earth. They took eighteen year old
idiots and hammered the stupid bastards into sailors.
You knew instinctively it had to be hell on earth to have
been born a Chief's kid. God should have given all
sons born to Chiefs a return option.
A Chief didn't have to command respect. He got it
because there was nothing else you could give them.
They were God's designated hitters on earth.
We had Chiefs with fully loaded Submarine Combat Patrol
Pins, and combat air crew wings in my day...hard-core
bastards who remembered lost mates, and still cursed the
cause of their loss...and they were expert at choosing
descriptive adjectives and nouns, none of which their
mothers would have endorsed.
At the rare times you saw a Chief topside in dress canvas,
you saw rows of hard-earned, worn and faded ribbons over his
pocket. "Hey Chief, what's that one and that one?"
"Oh hell kid, I can't remember. There was a war on.
They gave them to us to keep track of the campaigns."
"We didn't get a lot of news out where we were. To be
honest, we just took their word for it. Hell son, you
couldn't pronounce most of the names of the places we went.
They're all depth charge survival geedunk." "Listen
kid, ribbons don't make you a Sailor." We knew who the
heroes were, and in the final analysis that's all that
matters.
Many nights, we sat in the after mess deck wrapping
ourselves around cups of coffee and listening to their
stories. They were light-hearted stories about warm
beer shared with their running mates in corrugated metal
sheds at resupply depots where the only furniture was a few
packing crates and a couple of Coleman lamps. Standing
in line at a Honolulu cathouse or spending three hours
soaking in a tub in Freemantle, smoking cigars, and getting
loaded. It was our history. And we dreamed of
being just like them because they were our heroes.
When they accepted you as their shipmate, it was the highest
honor you would ever receive in your life. At least it
was clearly that for me. They were not men given to
the prerogatives of their position.
You would find them with their sleeves rolled up,
shoulder-to-shoulder with you in a stores loading party.
"Hey Chief, no need for you to be out here tossin' crates in
the rain, we can get all this crap aboard."
"Son, the term 'All hands' means all hands."
"Yeah Chief, but you're no damn kid anymore, you old coot."
"Horsefly, when I'm eighty-five parked in the stove up old
bastards' home, I'll still be able to kick your worthless
butt from here to fifty feet past the screw guards along
with six of your closest friends." And he probably
wasn't bullshitting.
They trained us. Not only us, but hundreds more just like
us. If it wasn't for Chief Petty Officers, there wouldn't be
any U.S. Navy. There wasn't any fairy godmother who
lived in a hollow tree in the enchanted forest who could
wave her magic wand and create a Chief Petty Officer.
They were born as hot-sacking seamen, and matured like good
whiskey in steel hulls over many years. Nothing a
nineteen year-old jay-bird could cook up was original to
these old saltwater owls. They had seen E-3 jerks come
and go for so many years; they could read you like a book.
"Son, I know what you are thinking. Just one word of
advice. DON'T. It won't be worth it."
"Aye, Chief."
Chiefs aren't the kind of guys you thank. Monkeys at the zoo
don't spend a lot of time thanking the guy who makes them do
tricks for peanuts.
Appreciation of what they did, and who they were, comes with
long distance retrospect. No young lad takes time to
recognize the worth of his leadership. That comes
later when you have experienced poor leadership or let's
say, when you have the maturity to recognize what leaders
should be, you find that Chiefs are the standard by which
you measure all others.
They had no Academy rings to get scratched up. They
butchered the King's English. They had become educated at
the other end of an anchor chain from Copenhagen to
Singapore . They had given their entire lives to the
U.S. Navy. In the progression of the nobility of
employment, Chief Petty Officer heads the list. So,
when we ultimately get our final duty station assignments
and we get to wherever the big Chief of Naval Operations in
the sky assigns us, if we are lucky, Marines will be
guarding the streets. I don't know about that Marine
propaganda bullshit, but there will be an old Chief in an
oil-stained hat and a cigar stub clenched in his teeth
standing at the brow to assign us our bunks and tell us
where to stow our gear... and we will all be young again,
and the damn coffee will float a rock.
Life fixes it so that by the time a stupid kid grows old
enough and smart enough to recognize who he should have
thanked along the way, he no longer can. If I could, I
would thank my old Chiefs. If you only knew what you
succeeded in pounding in this thick skull, you would be
amazed. So, thanks you old casehardened unsalvageable
son-of-a-bitches. Save me a rack in the berthing
compartment."
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's
about learning to dance in the rain. |
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